Excerpt, Opinion /.

by Bradford T. Still, PMD

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, Okay?”

Thus spoke our once and current president in January 2016, during a campaign rally at Dordt College, a church related institution in lows.

By all accounts, the crowd roared its approval of Trump’s message, his persona, his power.

As we know, Protestant Christians in
general, and evangelical Christians in
particular, flocked to the tent of Trump.

1. In 2016, 58% of Protestant Christians
who voted supported Trump: 81%
of Evangelical Christians who voted
supported Trump (in 2016 Hispanic
Roman Catholics who voted were the only group of Christians who did not vote in the majority for Trump).

It is fair to assume that these followers
of Jesus were not bothered by Trump’s desire to shoot someone -anyone?- on Fifth Avenue.

The age of Trump is the age of the Id
[the most primitive, unconscious part of the human mind unfettered.]

Trump 2.0 has only intensified the Id’s
drive to violence. Witness Renee Good,
Alex Pretti, the girls and their teachers
at the Iranian school, the unknown and
unnamed migrants who have been beaten, tortured, killed.

So, what to do?

Perhaps shockingly, we can do no better than to imagine a death camp commandant hanging from the gallows, chanting “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with missiles without ever seeing what you
have done.

These lines haunt the end of Thomas
Merton’s poem, “CHANT TO BE USED
IN PROCESSIONS AROUND A SITE
WITH FURNACES written in the same period. 

Merton was exploring Buddhism, the poems ironic Zen teacher born of Merton’s absurdist sensibility.

The commandant  challenges his reluctant students –us– to answer this koan:

If I look in the mirror and see a death camp commandant who is looking at me?

I am. You are. We are…

Am I my brother’s keeper? It does not
seem so.

Remember:

• Slavery.
The Trail of Tears.
Jim Crow.
Homophobia and misogyny.
• A New York Cardinal blessing US
troops on their way to Vietnam.

• US Secretary of War mongerer, Iron
Cross and all, praying in the name of
Jesus during services at the Pentagon.
We revel in violence (American
football?), cultivate it (a UFC match on
the White House lawn?), reward it (the
armament industry?).

Indeed, we have encoded violence at
the deepest levels of our legal systems.

As Robert Cover argues in his germinal
essay, “Violence and the Word,” “legal
interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.”

How so?

… To use a Buddhist phrase, symbolic and somatic violence “interpenetrate” each other. Words are symbols and attorneys and judges, as they interpret these symbols, work in a symbolic field.

Their interpretations have somatic consequences.

This alleged assault then enters
the symbolic. Police write a report.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys file
briefs and argue orally in court. Part of the oral argument might involve images of the weapon, the assaulted body…

If found guilty, the assailant meets violent somatic (and, indeed, psychic) punishment: incarceration, informed at every level by formal and informal violence.

Further, violence is at the center
of the American political experiment.
That gossamer poetry made prose in the Declaration of Independence was created by colonial and imperial violence and put into play in the new republic through violence. Are all men created equal?

Yes, but stewed in violence.

— from The Catholic Radical, Oct. / Nov. 2026